12 posts categorized "Hardware & Systems"

I read a very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday called A Head Trip: Indian Hair Finds Parts in Hollywood. The story was about the human hair market. Apparently the United States imported $47 million in human hair last year. It's big business. Here's how the value chain works. Hair wholesalers pay $45 to $75 per pound for strands of human hair. They then sell that hair to hair "manufacturers" for approximately 30 cents a strand. Hair manufacturers then process the hair and sell it to international distributors for approximately $1.50 a strand. Hairstylists then buy that hair and sell a full hair weave for between $1,500 and $3,000 (sadly, I don't have the data on how many strands of hair are used in a typical weave). And thanks to all these participants in the hair market, Lisa Marie Presley is able to instantaneously have long luxuriant hair.

But here was the really interesting part of the article to me. It talked about the temple at Tirupati in India from which one of the leading international hair wholesales buys tens of thousands of pounds of human hair each year. Millions of visitors to the temple annually have their heads shaved in thanks to Lord Vishnu for good events that have occurred in their lives. The temple then collects up that hair and sells it in the international hair market. Some of those who are shorn in honor of Lord Vishnu have no idea that their hair is being sold, but regardless no one is paid for the hair. As a result, the proceeds from the sale of hair is essentially pure profit. The hair is a costless byproduct of prayer at the temple and the temple uses it to its full advantage.

Other than it just being a fascinating read, the thing that struck me in reading the article was the incredible advantage the temple has if it ever comes to price competition. With a zero cost structure, they can never be underbid. Other suppliers of human hair are at a disadvantage because they have to pay for it. Ironically, the market leader in the human hair market is China, which is for once at a price disadvantage. We often have the conversation with presenting companies about the difficulty of competing with Chinese manufacturers because their cost structure is so incredibly low. As can be seen with numerous consumer electronic devices, networking products, etc., once the technology behind those devices becomes commoditized, Chinese manufacturers are at an incredible advantage given their extremely low cost structure. Not only has the pervasion of Chinese manufacturing lowered the cost of numerous devices and sped the process of component commoditization, it has changed the way in which startups must look at sales and marketing strategy for device enabling technologies. But, hey, at least those startups can take some solace in the fact that China is at a disadvantage when it comes to producing human hair. Who would have guessed?

Last night I attended a wonderful Seder at the Pitluck Home. Sam Pitluck is a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs Human Genome Center. The Human Genome Center, in conjunction with the US Department of Energy, has been frantically sequencing the human genome and have just published the finished human genome in time to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix. In celebration of the sequencing of the genome, Sam gave us all Genomics Posters as Seder favors (actually, my one year old got a stuffed matzoh man, but the rest of us got Genomics posters). It is actually an incredibly cool poster jam packed with info about the human genome and you can grab a pdf of it on the Department of Energy's Doe Joint Genome Institute website.

The sequencing of the human genome opens up incredible opportunities to understand the human body, disease, longevity, evolution, heredity, etc. But it also creates a huge challenge for information technology. The computational power available today is insufficient to unlock much more than the most trivial genetic relationships. For the sequencing of the human genome to be truly transformative, it will require a transformation of processing power as well. The holy grail on that front is quantum computing which, if achievable, will make gene sequencing trivial. In the mean time while we wait for a functioning quantum computer, genomic research labs look towards distributed processing, purpose built genomic processors and the like to solve their number crunching woes. There's little doubt that gene sequencing and bioinfomatics will be at the heart of biotech innovation in the near term. But there is equally little doubt that before the true value of the human genome can be unlocked, there will need to be innovation in the processing firepower that can be brought to bear on the problem.